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Bottle as Structure and Thinking Grids

Creating structures for yourself within which you operate is something that happens all the time. Consider when you do particular things at certain times of the day, give yourself an amount of time to complete a task, or ask someone to choose their ‘”favorite” movie. These are all structures that we use regularly but may take for granted. These two tools, Bottle as Structure and Thinking Grids, help you practice breaking down the process of creating structures. In particular, these tools ask you to be purposeful about how you bring two things together to spark new ideas, find relationships between things, edit or limit your options, and more.

Overview

You can follow along with Liz as she shows you how she uses Bottle as Structure and Thinking Grids to generate ideas about structures for a performance piece. For these tools, you’ll want some sort of bottle- it can be a reusable bottle or a mug as well- and some paper and something to write with. We recommend trying Bottle as Structure first before learning Thinking Grids. Keep in mind that, while Liz describes using these tools to provide structure for a performance piece, they can be used for all sorts of things that involve structures, such as lesson plans, presentations, group activities, and even research papers.

Many people say that Bottle as Structure and Thinking Grids feel familiar to them. Part of the reason for that is that we are constantly bringing together different things and finding ways they are in relationship. Did you find moments of working with these tools familiar? What applications do you see for these in your work in educational spaces? Remember that you can try Bottle as Structure with any object, and switching the objects with different characteristics will generarte widely different ideas about structure. After you’ve tried Thinking Grids with Liz, using the bottle as an example, try replacing the top axis with something else besides the bottle and see how it changes your thinking in relation to the aspects of your project that populate the other axis.